In response to the (most tasty) Melissa’s comment on the post below: surreal is indeed the word for how it feels to be so far from home and reading news of this shift in governmental power in Australia after 11 years of a fascistic federal administration. It’s a window of hope that the parliamentary process might now be able to deliver the occasional modicum of justice, maybe even that Australians voted beyond their hip pockets this time. It’s particularly surreal as this news comes to me while I’m in Bolivia, where state politics are currently playing out in an overtly life-threatening environment. Compare and contrast:
1.Front page of Bolivian national daily,
2.Front page of Australian national daily.
I’m thrilled that Howard no longer has any formal power over anyone else. His personal contribution to stoking the fires of fear has had a muted, deadly violence of its own; the kind that can hide behind the global economic and race privilege that any Australian government and social majority enjoys (the same goes for Brough. And likewise Ruddock, Abbott, Vanstone, Costello and Nelson - but they kept their seats). I hope someone looks closely into the contribution of GetUp! to this result - a stellar one I think; with their relentless, grassroots, non-partisan electr(on)ic energy for realising Change in the order of environmental and social justice. Oh, and it’s surreal to see young women from my Adelaide age-political peer group elected, and this one in particular who, if she isn’t elected, has achieved a rather brilliant result against ‘SA’s real eastern suburbs princess’ (further, I would bet on her capacity to be a much better politician than this one, who, if I recall rightly, ran on the Labor Right ticket in university student elections - back in the day when there was a student’s association at our alma mater - with the claim that we should vote for her “because she didn’t know anything about politics”. Genius.). It’s surreal to see Nick Xenophon elected to a parliament once again largely on the strength of his own (rather lovely, in my experience) charisma and autonomous-if-not-populist-but-still-refreshing-in-a-world-of-beige take on policymaking.
At any rate, over the next month till I come home I’ll be watching and hoping that the new government will pull the troops out of Iraq, scrap the NT intervention legislation, sign Kyoto (for pete’s sake!) and re-evaluate immigration policy to ensure that the likes of this, this, this, this, and this never happen again at, and in the name of, the borders of the Nation.
